Others dismissed concerns that employers would drop health coverage without the law’s mandate. The vast majority of large businesses already provide insurance to their workers, without any federal requirements to do so.

Groan. For decades there has been a huge tax incentive for employers to offer health coverage - the cost of health insurance is deductible to the employer as a compensation expense but is not taxable to the employee as income.

Other than for so-called "Cadillac plans" that will still be true under ObamaCare. However, ObamaCare introduces a powerful cross-current - employers can drop their coverage, pay a small-ish fine and let their employees fend for themselves on the new, government-subsidized exchanges, or they can shoulder the expense of health insurance as they have in the past. Folks who run the numbersconclude that the fines are low enough and the subsidies for low-income employees high enough that many firms, and their employees, can achieve a win-win by dropping the company health plan and shifting part of the cost to the government.

Ms. Kliff's notion that a tax-subsidized strategy will still be followed after the tax subsidies are drastically changed does not mesh with contemporary economic thought.

Jeralyn at TalkLeft says the following about the family members' claims that it was their son (or nephew or brother):

The court has recessed for the weekend. This is an advantage for the defense, that the last witnesses it heard today are two who insist it is Zimmerman's voice on the 911 call. That said, I suspect the jury will not rely on the family members on either side in determining who was screaming. A common sense view of the other evidence in the case, particularly that the only person with injuries was Zimmerman, is compelling evidence it could only have been Zimmerman screaming.

You guys can haggle over the minutia of the law, but I go back to first principles. In this case, Heinlein's dicta that "an armed society is a polite society" means to me that every kid should be raised with the fundamental rule: if you cock an arm to punch someone, be prepared to take a bullet in the face. Everything else is negociating on the price (like the old hustle line from the bar joke.) if you want to prove your machoness, put some gloves on and crawl into a ring. That goes especially to fat tub Beckel.

I'm ending my self-imposed exile to say that the prosecution’s rebuttal to the JOA is one of the most despicable things I’ve had the displeasure to witness.

Up until that point, I was giving the prosecutor’s the benefit of the doubt that they’d been dealt a lousy duty, and they were doing their best without even having the proverbial ham sandwich. In fact, one could credibly assert that they were actively throwing the case because they knew it was violation of Florida law to bring the charges.

Now instead they lied, they knowingly lied, they know their “evidence” doesn’t support their theory let alone their false assertions, and they all should be disbarred.

Yes they are clowns, but these clowns have people's lives in their hands... how times have they done this kind of crap away from cameras?

"(CNSNews.com) - Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate."

DrJ. We are in uncharted territory. The MFM simply cannot bring themselves to understand, believe and admit, that Obama is a CLUSTERFUK beyond EPIC PROPORTIONS. Obama's belief systems, his instincts and his CHARACTER are so beyond fukked up, as to be CRIMINAL. They just will not admit it. What kind of complete AMERICAN COLLAPSE could possibly change that mindset and have an ability to HELP US???

29 hour a week burger flipping jobs. Why are they not 40 hour a week burger flipping jobs??
WHAT CHANGED?? Unfortunately, Marxists, lie and lie and lie, and LIBTARD believe and believe and USUALLY DIE.

Besides Valerie Jarrett, these are some of the other players in this portrait of a royal court, that Leibovich details;;

But wait, there’s more! Scads of other inside players, big and small, get more briskly sideswiped. Walter Isaacson, the Aspen Institute president, “always blows right past” the author at parties en route to the more important folks, “and if he greets me at all, he calls me ‘Matthew,’ which I’ve never bothered to correct because Walter is so smart, for all I know my name IS Matthew.” . . . Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent, is teased for his giant wedding cake, made to look like the White House, and is portrayed as eagerly sucking up to the French ambassador’s deputy in hopes of an invitation to the elite Vanity Fair/Bloomberg party. . . Though White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to pretend he was only vaguely familiar with Hilary Rosen after the strategist dissed Ann Romney, Leibovich recalls seeing them dance together at a super-cozy party thrown by lobbyists for “Meet the Press” producer Betsy Fischer.

Regulation: a little-noticed change in energy-efficiency requirements for appliances could lead to government controlling the power used in your home and how you set your thermostat.

...the EPA included an "optional" requirement for a "smart-grid" connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerators or freezers with a utility provider...with the Obama administration's renewed focus on fighting mythical climate change, we expect it to become mandatory

...former EPA director Carol Browner told U.S. News & World Report in 2009, "we can get to a system when an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air-conditioner won't operate at its peak."

So if one day you keep your house too cool or your beer too cold and the dials start moving, don't be surprised. Its just a campaign promise being kept.

I'd forgotten about the gas price issue, but you're right of course. The evil oil man Bush would not upset his cronies in the business. And Darth Cheney headed Haliburton, that (muttering under breath) oil services company.

Now? Green is good! And the sycophants swoon. The economy? Let's talk about rising oceans! Or Egypt. Or illegal aliens and shadows. Or anything else.

You and the Wolverine should'a been in Narita Japan last night. It was the first day of the 3 Day Narita Gihon Festival:

It's a festival celebrating the arrival of spring. The streets were jammed with thousands of very happy people and wonderful food stalls, as teams of locals from the various precincts around the ancient Temple pulled their shrine-carts, loaded with their instrument playing elders and their image of some god, up and down the narrow old street.

It's hard to have a funner time and I'm sure the Wolverine would have loved it, as they let the kids, sorted by age, be allowed to help pull along the shrine carts.

"Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: 'Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.'

"Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.

"This lesson in the Obama administration’s approach to the rule of law is pertinent to the immigration bill, which at last count had 222 instances of a discretionary'“may' and 153 of 'waive.' Such language means that were the Senate bill to become law, the executive branch would be able to do pretty much as it pleases, even to the point of saying about almost anything: Never mind."

Concur about Meza's testimony. Anyone who achieved the rank of Command Sergeant Major is as good a witness as you can find, and is toyed with at the opponent's peril. IMO, the best thing bar none that BDLR did in this trial was to sit down after CSM Meza testified.

I recall how during the Gulf Oil Spill BP's CEO Tony Hayward was harshly criticized for yachting.

on ABC’s This Week, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Hayward yachting off the English coast during the oil crisis is “part of a long line of P.R. gaffes and mistakes.”

On CBS’s Face the Nation yesterday Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) called on Hayward to step down. “I thought the fact that the chairman of BP had the gall, the arrogance, to go to a yacht race…in England, while all of this was going on here was the height of stupidity. And I believe myself that he should go,” Shelby said.

And recall this from Obama in 2010 after BP's CEO Tony Hayward was seen yachting during the Gulf Oil spill:

Obama wondered aloud in a television interview this month about "whose ass to kick" over the BP spill and said that if Hayward had worked for him, he would have fired him...Hayward also was widely criticized and quickly apologized for complaining he wanted his "life back"

The one advantage the defense sort of gained during the JOA hearing was to learn the States closing argument and hoe the will proceed on cross. But what really showed up is they basically have nothing but a "theory" and no hard evidence. Even their cicumstantial evidence is more emotionally based (my son's scream) or speculative (GZ the agressor).

MoM and team are working this weekend turning out round pegs to fit the holes Bernie and Jay Carney's lost twin left them.

Does Florida have a decent recall statute? If the jury acquits, the climate would be perfect for a recall of responsible parties. Nelson and Corey for incompetence in running a lynching, Bondi for appointing Corey and Scott for not insuring the competence of the lynch mob State's Injustice Department.

The Just Us for Trayvon crowd would be happy to circulate petitions during looting breaks.